Metric Spamming

If your efforts grow to any reasonable size, tracking your success becomes at least as involving and vital and optimizing in the first place. Thus, it is irritating at best and harmful at worst when spammers choose to exploit your web metrics utilities by inundating your site with false data.

There are several good ways of combating this, the first being to place your most important metric boards behind authentication blocks. This can be as simple as putting up an .htaccess block if you have a Unix/Linux server. By doing so, you negate the possibility of the spammer’s result receiving any visibility from either web traffic or search engine spiders, as well as preventing many of their spamming attempts from ever being recorded in the first place.

Another excellent method of inhibiting spam on web metrics that depend on user input (e.g. guestbooks, polls, contact forms, etc.) is to incorporate image validation. This involves putting a dynamically-generated image in a form along with a randomly-generated number, both of which are linked to an encryption algorithm. Because automated bots and the like have great difficulty reading images into text, this limits input to human users, which severely limits the amount of spam that such forms receive.

The fact of the matter is that spammers will always find loopholes with which to game the system. However, it is possible to hinder or prevent their effect upon your own website in order to obtain an accurate picture of its progress.